


i will catch you like the wind

by moonsandstar_s



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, tw for death and suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-27
Updated: 2015-06-27
Packaged: 2018-04-06 12:17:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4221453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonsandstar_s/pseuds/moonsandstar_s
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>we left the dust to settle<br/>anywhere it wants to fall<br/>making patterns on the window<br/>leaving marks upon the wall</p><p>- try, zach berkman</p>
            </blockquote>





	i will catch you like the wind

The first time you died, it was on a new moon.

You have always remembered that void emptiness. Have remembered choking on a cry and a mouthful of metallic blood; remembered distinct panic because everything was cruelly dark, starless and there was no light to guide you home just before your heart stopped, and you died. The lights had gone out and everything was a thrashing, agonizing black, and you had tried to speak. To say something because darkness was laughing all around you and you were dying with fire in your chest and frightful, terrible pain too.

When you woke, you felt empty and still. There was an absence in your chest and still, you cannot remember the memory of a heartbeat.

You woke to a sunset of blood-red clouded fire, the zenith of a crescent moon stealing across the sky, and you felt light and free and chained all at once. Metal still tainted your mouth; copper, disgusting and rancid. Plinths of ice dripped like diamonds all around and you were terribly, terribly alone, a broken, spread-eagled body.

Somewhere in the distance, birds sang. And a pallid, lightless face was watching you. An angelic face with cold, cold eyes: the new moon could not match the darkness in these.

“Child,” she had said, “what is your name?”

“Mircalla Karnstein.”

A cough, a whisper, a flutter of panic. But the feeling is not life, and you wonder why you are so very cold.

 

/ /

The feeling of loneliness never quite goes away. You learn to live with a rockfall in your chest and avalanches in your mind: quivering bones, scarred hands, more metal in your mouth than you know what to do with.

Mother, as she’s persistent in your name of her, is adamant on your honing of skills: you grow to hate the polished ivory of your fangs, the scarlet blooms of blood, the savage monster that lies slumbering, just below a thin veil, in your heart.

And you’re terrified that one day it will awaken.

You’re alone in Austria, on the foothills of snow capped violet crests: it’s in these seldom, empty moments that you are overwhelmed, and you don’t know if the earthquake that rents you is worse than the feeling of numbness.

“Darling,” Mother says one day, her eyes, cunning smile, so very like winter, breathing snow down your spine, “I would very like you to meet your sister.”

You think of your father, how you were his favorite, your mother, scholarly and regal, your brother, mischievous and arrogant, your sister, kind and gentle.

Your tongue passes over the razor edges poking out of your canines and you nod with a despair as deep as courage because the notion of protest perished so long ago.

/ /

She’s tall, Matska Belmonde. You have never really noticed that you’re short but when she’s looking down like you’re something to be used and thrown away, you feel so small.

One hand snakes under your jaw, forcing your chin up to meet unreadable dark eyes. Her gaze flickers across your face before she addresses Mother in a silkily bored tone. “Not a particularly remarkable one, Mother, is she?”

You tear away, scowling, as Mother smiles indulgently. “Do not be so insolent. She is your sister, now, Mattie dear,” she husks, “and I expect you will be the best of friends.” She looks between the two of you, emotionless, before sweeping from the room.

Matska’s eyes are hardened, cold, cruel, despite the smile on her face. You recognize the eyes of a wolf out for blood, the hollow, sad eyes of impervious, imperious time itself. Blood stains her fangs and you can smell that it is a fresh kill.

You want to forget that you might look like that one day: an empty husk.

A terrible feeling is opening within you and every chasm in the world could not match the utter, damned darkness that this inspires within you.

“Who are you, then, really?” She growls, smile dropping, and you meet her gaze and something rattles with anger inaide of you.

“A monster,” you reply, and her laugh grates like claws; the darkness in her soul, a poet said.

“Darling, sister,” she says softly, fixing you with a considering gaze, bitter and reminiscently, “aren’t we all?”

/ /

“I can’t. I can’t do it.”

Mattie’s gaze is furiously scornful as she shakes the terrified human girl by her shoulders. “Kill her, Mircalla. Now!”

“No!”

Anger, something bordering smoldering disgust and reproach, crosses her face before Mattie reaches down with bloody fangs and tears out the mortal’s throat. Despite your stomach growling as blood gushes out, you’ve never felt less hungry as the girl slumps, dead, and Mattie licks bloodied fingers.

“We’ll make a vampire out of you yet,” she snarls. Delicately stepping over the growing pool of blood, she pauses and you swallow back disgust.

“Aren’t you going to…?” You gesture at the blood.

“Killing is all the fun,” Mattie says lazily before melting into the shadows.

As you go to follow, your foot brushes the dead girl’s head.

Glazed eyes stare up with the last remnants of horror in them.

You’ll face those looks for the rest of your life.

/ /

The second time you died, the moon was full and yet all that light could not temper the taunting shadows inside of you.

Mattie was off in Morocco and Mother didn’t need you. You were left to explore.

You’ve seen many things: crumbling abandoned villas, storm stained horizons, the vast power of waterfalls, the rise and fall of empires, starlight splashing a bleeding battlefield.

There’s a certain amount of detachment when you walk through the worn paths of time. The metal is always there: you shake your soul free of the dust only to have it settle back sooner rather than later.

The decision is made because, really, you’re angry and caged and desolate and numb, all at once. There is a war shaking your core; you’re made of stone, of bloodied rubble. People have died because of you and perhaps the knowledge that you don’t care because you’re embracing the monster you have been so long now.

It’s in Cambria: there is a metal plated bridge, a full moon watching silently. You step off, feel the wind howling around you take the final plunge-

And feel sheer blackness, wrapping around you, cackling and chilling you and draining mercy and light before the ground is flying up to meet you and then all is agony; molten fire; branded words that whip past too fast for you to read.

And then the moon is gone; all is complete and utter emptiness.

/ /

“You really are dim, darling sister. Never jump off a bridge again, will you?”

Your bones feel like they’ve been shattered as you raise your head and look at Mattie. Her expression is obscured by shadows.

“How did you find me?”

She snorts, fingers sifting over a packet of blood. “It wasn’t hard. I felt the connection that Mother made between kin sever. I knew it had to be you.”

“Thanks,” you whisper, and her eyes flash.

“I thought you wouldn’t make it. It took about fifty liters of blood and a few weeks to revive you. Look at yourself,” she snarls, and you recognize a mask of relieved, angry concern under her disdain.

You shift your eyes down and shudder. You’re broken and bloodied and pain rents you.

“Well,” you cough and barely move your mouth, for fear of inciting further injury, “It’s a shame that this spoils my looks.”

Mattie doesn’t laugh. She lights a cigarette and the end glows; a lighted ember. A grim look is on her face as smoke drifts up and ash crumbles down.

“It is,” she says from the corner of her mouth, smoke curling up, her eyes two twin flames, “because in these weeks, you have been given orders from Mother that curtail on just that.”

/ /

The game to sacrifice, Mother explains, is essential. And she’s saved you, Mother, so you owe her.

But still you try to save them, the five chosen victims, you try so hard.

And every time you fail, and see the betrayal taunting as they die in light, a twisted parallel to your own death all those decades ago.

/ /

The third time you died, the moon abandoned you.

In 1872, the game starts off again, exactly the same. You don’t expect anything more than going through the motions of myth and mystery.

And then, you see her.

You tumble from the carriage, and a small warm hand is pulling you up, and your eyes are meeting hers, and something explodes into the space between you, silently powerful.

Wide, dark gold eyes. They’re flecked with a rich amber-brown. Blown pupils that sparkle like dark river stones. A spattering of freckles above her arched nose. Dimples. Flowing blonde hair threaded with red. A smile full of sunshine.

Ell, she says quietly, is her name.

She chases away the emptiness in your chest, and a spark awakens in your marrow.

When you chase her by the pond, she kisses you first, and the fireflies are just coming out of the woods, and you feel so alive for the first time in forever.

You make your jurisdictions to escape. The plan is detrimental to itself, but you fight dread against hope to keep her. She doesn’t know what monster you are, but…

You hope, anyways. It’s probably foolish to cling so pathetically to that emotion, but you hope against hope that she’ll be different.

And you fall in love with her, somewhere along the way. She agrees to leave with you.

You’re waiting in the silver night painted dark when it all goes terribly wrong: Mother greets you instead, and Ell is in her choking grip, and her eyes are terribly cold.

“Dear, dear.” Her eyes are like spheres of ice and her voice is disdainful, ancient. “You know disobedience cannot be tolerated, Carmilla,” she says, and then she’s advancing.

“How did you know I was here?” you splutter, and she laughs that damned fox’s laugh.

“It was all too easy when I revealed your secret,” she smiles, and Ell is crying.

“Ell,” you whisper brokenly. “No.”

She doesn’t meet your gaze, but you know she doesn’t love you anymore.

You have never hated the blood in your veins more, and you want to rip out your teeth.

Then Mother is sealing you in the coffin with little resistance. You’ve lost your fight; you’re a silhouette, a lifeless form.

And it’s dark, and it’s choking you, and you are struggling against the strong wood. Your chest is breaking open, and Mother’s voice comes through, muffled, silky and poisonous.

“My dearest, my glittering girl, I warned you of what consequences there would be for falling in love.”

And then a sickening crunch comes, and an agonized scream, and you shriek desperately as you recognize it to be Ell. Blood starts to seep through the panels of wood, at first dripping, and then faster and faster, flowing through and drenching you in wetness and disappearing air that holds a thick tang of metal, and you’re choking as you realize there’s too much for her small body to live. And you press your lips together: you never want her blood to touch you, and it’s drowning you inside and out.

And then everything goes black.

/ /

It’s dark. And it’s cold, and the air is sour and bitter and tanged with copper and earth and you are a skeleton. A corpse with your lips sewn shut and your hair woven into nothing, your skin stretched tight over brittle bones.

You can’t see, hear, touch, sense, or taste, but your mind is just as functional, and seventy years of remembering tends to scar a person beyond repair. The blood is all gone: you drained it, silently hating yourself, bitter and rancid, after fourteen years of hunger got way too much to bear, and you cannot even move now. Hunger claws you to shreds every moment that feels like death, like a living nightmare. It’s a wonder you’re not insane.

You can’t sleep. Maybe your circadian rhythm is screwed over. You don’t know. All you know is the thick darkness that cradles you.

You know somewhere deep inside that it’s been years, so many years.

You think you’d really like to forget now.

Then—the war. It comes first as a distant thrum in the shaking earth, so frail, so quiet, you think it’s your blown heartbeat. Then louder, and then the coffin is vibrating erratically in the earth and white is blasting you out of the ground and you’re thrown into the sky with a shower of blood and rocks at your back.

You hit the ground hard and your skin splits, and you’re a crawling skeleton gripped with a primal urge to survive.

Even though you’re already dead, all things considered, it seems of little consequence.

There are soldiers, and tanks, and mines, and bombs. You lay barely conscious under the lee of a hill for God knows how long before the fighting ceases and all is eerily quiet, and the air is drenched with the coppery scent of blood, and your stomach is howling in agony.

You crawl out from the dirt-riddled, shadow shrouded lee, blood rusting you red from the coffin. Leaves rustle under your shifting, bony arms as you drag yourself pitifully across the dirt and forest mold to the closest body. You sink your fangs into the arched neck of the solider nearest you, your stomach churning wildly. His skin is still warm. Crimson splashes over your tongue.

You drain every single soldier on that field dry before stumbling from the grounds, your lips painted red, head spinning, torn heart in your wake.

You barely make it to the edge of the woods before you’re throwing it all up over the winter-scorched grasses, and even when you’re dropped to your knees, your body is still shaking and heaving, trying to get rid of the poison.

/ /

When you meet Mattie, traveling with Mother in Paris, your bones shake. There is a tall boy with them, his skin pale, eyes and hair dark. You can sense the shimmering veil of immortality on him and you think of red flowers, of silver stars, lit sparks.

/ /

And maybe because you’re just that fucking reckless, you fall in love with one of the Marks again.

She’s startlingly like Ell, Laura Hollis, but also shockingly different: you wonder what it is like to love without adrenaline in your veins; sparks in your chest.

/ /

The third time you died, you drove a sword into your demons.

The cavern under the Lustig is blazing with fierce, horrible light: you feel the Sword humming and tendrils of darkness snake out to swallow it up. Mattie is gone, in Morocco, and Will has never been close to you. And this is redemption or death and you welcome it.

The shift comes naturally and as a panther, the light is not so blinding, the darkness not so imperious. Fear, unceasing, batters you in a relentless tide as you see Laura and it’s with speed that you hurl yourself and fling her backward.

“Carmilla?” She’s gasping but then you see Mother and courage, the despairing courage you know so well, makes you reckless.

And even when you know what you must do, you hesitate.

Ell’s ghost is right there, but Laura’s eyes are heartbroken and you want, so much, what you simply cannot have.

You take one last look: her face, forever imprinted on your mind, a promise that you were not lost from the start.

And then you turn, raise the Sword.

And leap.

And light explodes and shatters, blinding you in a world of patterned stars and someone is screaming horribly and the Sword is searing your hands and suddenly everything is spinning away faster than you can snatch and you’re falling-

into darkness

into the night sky

into the space of heartbeats

into winding tunnels and twisting passages

into swirling nightmares and broken promises

into the cries of those victims gone before and the fiercest winds

into chilling ice and freezing rain

into blazing flames and golden sunlight

into the lamentations of birds

into the mournful songs of crickets

into the dying, fading light

into the void

into complete

and utter

silence.

And Laura is torn from you, rent apart and scattered

blazing away like a comet’s tail

as agony tears through you, making you twist and writhe

a silent scream spiraling away as fire rocks you to the bone

bubbles and life wrench from your jaws to flood the abyss

stars flash behind your eyes in the inky depths

faces swim before you, too quickly for you to grab

and not one of them are hers.

/ /

it is a quiet agony

and words that have come before flash past;

did you ever exist?

or are you a dream

and is this your eternal Hell?

you don’t know, all is dark dark dark

you cannot feel

cannot breathe

ash and dust are overwhelming you

and there is no moon

all is lightless

and empty.

/ /

The fourth time, you lived.

You are reborn to sunlight streaming in, and a face you thought you would never see again.

It feels a little like healing, and wonder floods you, because maybe- maybe- this is your little taste of heaven.

“Well,” the words rattle in your throat, “that was a kick.”

Her arms are around you then, and oh, because you’re finally home, there in her embrace.

Out of your peripherals, you see the other two hurrying out and Laura’s speaking but you hardly hear her, because you’re standing and her breath catches.

And when you kiss her, taste her like sunlight, sharp and warm and chasing away the darkness, all the deaths fade into the past.


End file.
